Cabbage is having a cultural moment and it’s also one of the most amazing sleeper foods for your brain and for your mental health. Hey everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey, one of the pioneers in Nutritional Psychiatry. I’m a board certified psychiatrist in active clinical practice and I want to talk to you about cabbage.
If you’ve never talked to a psychiatrist about cabbage before, it’s okay. It’s going to be a great conversation for both of us because I’m going to get to share with you all of the amazing information from the perspective of the psychiatrist. Why cabbage is amazing for your brain health and your health and why it should be having the great cultural moment that it’s having right now.
What does cabbage mean to us? Well, I want to talk to you as someone who’s grown cabbage and prescribes cabbage. Luck, prosperity, and wealth. And right now, when we think about what we’re hoping for, what you’re hoping for here in 2026, I would say that we need a little bit of luck, some good fortune is a way to think about that, especially when we think luck favors the prepared. So how can we be doing this? All of my tips and hope that you’re working to achieve mental fitness. So luck favors the prepared, prepare your mental fitness. Prosperity and wealth, this is the idea that we’re going to be generative. And right now, especially with all of the headlines we’re seeing about a lot of destruction, a lot of decay, a lot of really challenging moments, to be sitting and meditating with your cabbage on wealth and prosperity, centering down a bit, thinking around your goals for 2026.
Cabbage should be a centering and focusing food for you this year because cabbage has been there. Cabbage is one of those foods that sustain us through all difficult and challenging times in history. And the cabbage, as any farmer knows, is a little bit challenging to grow. Unlike its cousin kale, where you get hundreds and hundreds of leaves from a kale plant. But from the cabbage, just one head. One head you’re watching grow all season long, you’re protecting, and then there you have it, usually in the late fall, sometimes after a frost, so it sweetens up just a little bit.
Why is cabbage an amazing food for right now? In 2026, we need foods that are simple, wholesome, and are economical. And cabbage fits the bill. This is one of the reasons it’s a key traditional food. When we think about this trend we’ve seen in health and mental health to start eating a more traditional diet, what that really means is eating more simple plants, more traditional foods like cabbage and all of the wonderful things that throughout history, so many cultures have done with it.
Let’s get into the Nutritional Psychiatry details about one cup of purple cabbage. Now we’ve picked purple cabbage for a good reason. I’ll tell you in just a minute. So first vitamin C, this cruciferous vegetable cabbage has got lots of vitamin C, 56% in just a cup. Vitamin C is one of our favorite antioxidants, but in Nutritional Psychiatry, we want you to get it from food, not from supplements.
All right, up next is vitamin K. You don’t think enough about vitamin K. It is one of the fat soluble vitamins. Now, why in Nutritional Psychiatry do we care about fat soluble vitamins? Because your brain is mostly made of fat. So you’re looking to take care of, to kind of prevent from oxidizing these very long, delicate fats. And vitamin K helps with that. So 28% of Vitamin K in one cup of cabbage.
Why purple cabbage? That’s for the anthocyanins. Everybody makes such a big deal about blueberries and blackberries. Amazing for your mental health. As we saw in a huge nature paper that came out looking at anthocyanins, those purple and blue pigments that are in plants, we found out that it’s not that they go to the brain. What they do is they they prune and influence the microbiome, that decreases the inflammatory signal. It’s amazing new science and one of the reasons we want to look at your plate and see that rainbow and we want to see purple in there whenever possible. This is why a purple cabbage is a great option. Another one that’s related is radicchio.
Nutritional Psychiatry is always asking you to consider thinking about your microbiome and the fiber content of things like cabbage. Cabbage is this great mix of soluble and insoluble fiber. Those are the two types of fiber that we’re eating in your microbiome. All the organisms that live in your gut, all these bacteria, they thrive on both. And so we want to make sure we eat a variety of plants.
One of the things I see here on my couch in clinical practice is oftentimes when people think about prebiotic foods, these are foods with fiber, right? Plants. They go to that list online, right? Jerusalem artichokes. And they think, I’ve never made that at home. It’s always concerned me. What you want to think about is plants. All plants have fiber. So cabbage, onions, garlic, all these are great prebiotic foods. So don’t leave out the cabbage just because it’s not on everyone’s prebiotic food list. It’s amazing food for helping your microbiome.
Let’s talk some of the deep science of why purple cabbage just so great for your mental health and your overall health. Cabbage belongs to the family of cruciferous vegetables. Now, cruciferous vegetables are some of the most healthy, most powerful vegetables that we have on the planet. Things like broccoli and kale. They’re all cousins. They’re cruciferous vegetables. They’re called cruciferous because when you grow them, their flowers make a little cross, which is just a little fun botanical fact. Now these cruciferous vegetables are filled with these sulfur containing phytonutrients, things like sulforaphane or quercetin. And these are very powerful antioxidants. But here in Nutritional Psychiatry and on this channel, you’re going to learn a little bit more beyond that. They’re more than antioxidants. They’re cell signals. So what happens when you eat these molecules is our body, our cells recognize them and it shifts how we transcribe, how we express our DNA. There’s this really profound, over time, anti-inflammatory effect that you get from eating more cruciferous vegetables. This is one of these things that everybody seems to agree on. The vegetarians, the carnivores, everybody thinks cruciferous vegetables are amazing because there’s so much science behind them and behind these molecules. Instead of getting them in a supplement form in Nutritional Psychiatry and on my channel, I’m always going to be asking you to try and get these from food. That’s really the most active, most live, most healthy source, in my opinion, and it’s where we’ve always gotten it from.
All right, here we go. Our favorite part of Nutritional Psychiatry. After all the brain benefits, how do we eat this and how do you get more red cabbage into your life? That’s my favorite part of being a Nutritional Psychiatrist is thinking about you as an eater. So I’m going to talk through some of the ways that I’ve incorporated purple cabbage into my life and I encourage my patients to.
So first of all, when I think about cabbages, I love them in a fermented form. So that’s going to be a sauerkraut or a kimchi. You can add on to your rice bowl, to a pasta dish, drop in your salad and so I love having that in the fridge whenever possible. Next up for me is the simple saute. I like to chop it up really thin and get it going in a in a hot cast iron skillet with a little bit of garlic and some olive oil. This is just a wonderful way for me to do any type of cruciferous vegetable, but I love cabbage this way. Now sometimes I’ll cut the cabbage and I’ll do a red or purple cabbage steak where I really sear it on both sides. That’s a favorite for me for sure. Other ways that we see cabbage being used is just chopped up in a salad or who doesn’t love a great super healthy coleslaw where you can have it in there. It adds a nice pop of color. Then a way that I probably do cabbage the most is on my sheet pan because I love oven roasted vegetables. This is just one of the simplest ways that you get that great caramelized, yummy, kind of crunchy, kind of carby, delicious cabbage. So I’ll take a cabbage, chop it up. A bigger chunk is going to roast a little bit less, still have a little more crunch in the middle, whereas if you go thin, you’re going to cook it all the way through. Slide it in the oven, usually around 375 degrees. I’m going to say about 10 to 20 minutes, depending on how you prepare it. Now keep checking on it, get it right to where you want. You’ll see it starting to kind of brown up and crisp up. I like to put it in with a lot of other vegetables.
Those are some of my ways to really enjoy cabbage. If you have some other ideas, please drop them in the comments below. You see cabbage in all kinds of wonderful dishes. We didn’t mention soups or stews or all these wonderful ways to get both these purple pigments but also all these health benefits of cabbage that we’ve been talking about.
You heard it here first. Nutritional Psychiatry vegetable of the year 2026 is purple cabbage. We’ve been seeing cabbage pop in 2026, but we want to put our little twist on it of Nutritional Psychiatry information and science of how purple cabbage is so amazing for your mental health and your brain health. It’s one of those foods that I bet isn’t in your rotation yet. And after this video, I sure hope that it is.
Please check out all of our resources to help you really start to optimize how you think about food and mental health. Take the really important practical step of integrating Nutritional Psychiatry and how you take care of yourself and build more mental fitness. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey, everyone. I hope you’ll share this video. I hope you’ll save it and I hope you’ll sign up for our newsletter so I can keep helping you get the right molecules into your brain to optimize your brain health and your mental health.
